IOwec making improvements while eagerly waiting for finalist announcement

The preparation of the 1/20th Scale Building schedule, the BOM and the budget took quite a large portion of this month. Most of the energies were spent to find commercial components for our innovative device in order to fit the desired specifications and find the best balance between performance and cost. We are looking forward to receive the results of the tests at Stevens that did not evidence any big problem or failure (structural or functional) and of course keep our finger crossed for the judges’ response on Technology Gate 2 hoping to continue as finalist the adventure in this very demanding and inspired competition.

In this eagerly waiting, we cannot stay with our hands folded, because we want to arrive at March 1stwith the best IOwec possible configuration. In order to perfect every detail of the 1/20th prototype all the members are working hard for the last improvements, thanks to the experience gained in the 1/50thscale tank tests.

The MIT team is working on a new time domain potential flow model with non-linear free surface conditions that will be used for the optimization of the floater shape and PRTT characteristics, as well as different active control strategies for the PTO, that will be allowed during the tests at MASK. The new potential flow model, in fact, is faster than a RANSE simulation and more accurate than the state of the art linear frequency domain methods like WAMIT or AQWA. In parallel, viscous, multi-physics, multi-body numerical simulations are running day and night to verify the new non-linear potential flow model.

The Italian part of the team will come soon to Boston with the aim to work together with the MIT colleagues on the final optimization of the device and with the building activities.